Emanuele Paternò's research on colloids

Abstract

Emanuele Paternò (Palermo, 1847-1935) obtained a chair in chemistry at the University of Turin in 1871 and a year later took the chair in Palermo, succeeding to his master S. Cannizzaro in Rome. His pioneering studies (1869) on tetrahedral carbon are well known worldwide. From 1885 on, Paternò made deep studies on cryoscopy, applying this technique to the determination of molar masses of organic compounds. Later studies (1889-1910) on colloidal solutions brought him to important results revealing some basic properties of colloidal solutions, showing that molecular aggregation is solvent dependant.